The Visceral Extends Its Domain: The Rules Of The Game Continues

[koganbot]

Here's the first ever Rules Of The Game Followup Column. Contains metal and morality, romance and longing. Quotes Martin. You're encouraged to comment here, there, everywhere.

EDIT, JUNE 8: Strangely, the link I'd posted in the previous paragraph didn't work after a few days, so I had to track down where the piece was and fix the link.

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

Comments

Re: WHY DO PEOPLE SAY THESE THINGS

[koganbot]

Well, take K-Punk's phrase "Popism's calls to be always cheerful about mass culture" and start substituting names in, e.g., "Joshua Kortbein's calls to be always cheerful about mass culture" or "Tom Ewing's calls to be always cheerful about mass culture" or "Tim Finney's calls to be always cheerful about mass culture" or "Frank Kogan's calls to be always cheerful about mass culture" and you'll probably see why I think this is offensive. Not that I consider any of the above people "popists" or consider "popists" a particularly useful term, but then as far as I can tell no one has ever called for being always cheerful about mass culture, and even if someone had, I don't see why K-Punk would want to pay more than fleeting attention to that person. I guess I myself would have to pay attention to the breadth and depth of K-Punk's work to understand what role such stupid claims of his make. Hypothesis 1: at least in this instance, he's searching for stupidity in others rather than trying to strengthen his own thought. Hypothesis 2: he's assigning a stupid position to "popists" in order to avoid taking in or taking on the actual intelligent things that various people actually do say. You know, if he doesn't mean Ewing et al., whom does he mean? And even if there are people who do take K-Punk's idea of the "popist" position (one that Tom et al. don't take), why is K-Punk focusing on those people rather than on the smart people and making the dumb ones representative of "popism" or whatever it is they supposedly represent? But I'm not likely to test my hypotheses since I don't see why I would want to pay more than fleeting attention to K-Punk's claims about "popism" and I don't think that K-Punk himself is representative of anything either (well, of any critique or position; he may be representative of laziness and resentment). Perhaps if I had read more of his stuff, as I have of Reynolds', I'd see the above passage as an aberration. But I sure don't see it as a herald of fascinating thought that I'd be eager to explore further.

Re: WHY DO PEOPLE SAY THESE THINGS

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

Yeah, as I think I've said elsewhere, the point where I was done with Simon was when he started responding to my blog posts without linking to my blog posts or mentioning me, just saying "people who say blah blah blah about MIA." And he was just repeating my argument! I'm still a bit unclear why he did it--it wasn't like he was shy about linking to other people's blogs--but it was the real nail in the coffin for me.

Re: WHY DO PEOPLE SAY THESE THINGS

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

And yes, as you say at the end, it was mitigated by the fact that Simon's a very good writer, but as a novice maybe that just made it all the more frustrating for me. (Resentissement!)

Re: WHY DO PEOPLE SAY THESE THINGS

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

i would think k-punk would be an excellent example of the kind of music writer who could stand a good course of treatment. he clearly believes music to be important beyond itself, but he's got a theory, or a bunch of theories, that cause him to talk in terms of the theories rather than in terms of what people are actually doing. (we would say; he could well say that he IS paying attention to what people are actually doing, as his theories would indicate!)

Re: WHY DO PEOPLE SAY THESE THINGS

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

by the way, upon googling i notice that yall have had this discussion with k-punk before (though i didn't see frank in there anywhere?). so maybe this is more a matter of 'why did this conversation fail?' rather than 'why is this conversation not being allowed to start?'